| This thesis belongs to the interdisciplinary theoretical research in the direction of"poetics and cultural semiotics" in foreign linguistics and applied linguistics.It aims to theoretically and semiotically expand "six-factor-and-six-function model" of Jakobson’s verbal communication theory,transforming this linguistic model into a semiotic one,expanding its application from the field of linguistics to society and culture at large,and thus offering theoretical interpretation and practical significance for the typical features of contemporary culture.Roman Jakobson(1896-1982)was a renowned Russian-Ameircan linguist,literary theorist and semiotician in the 20th century.As one of the founders and leading members of Russian Formalism,Prague School and New York Linguistic Circle,Jakobson made enormous contributions to the development of the 20th century humanites,especially in the field of linguistics and poetics.According to Jakobson,no matter how changeable and complicated a language is,it has a purpose and serves a certain function.Influenced by other forerunners,Jakobson proposed his theory of verbal communication and distinguishes six communication functions,each associated with a dimension or factor of the communication process.That is addresser,addressee,context,message,contact and code with each of these six factors determining a different function of language respectively,i.e.emotive,conative,referential,poetic,phatic and metalingual.Jakobson’s verbal communication theory with six factors and corresponding functions serves as the core of his theory of linguistic poetics and becomes widely employed in the field of linguistics,poetics,literature,philosophy and semiotics.Nevertheless,few researchers carry out a probing into its academic sources,theoretical connotation and contempory value.Regarding the core position and contemporary academic vale of Jakobson’s verbal communication theory in his system of academic thoughts,the present study intends to investigate the following three questions:(1)What is the academic basis of Jakobson’s verbal communicaton theory?How does the six-factor-six-funtion model develop academically?What are other researchers’ contribution and Jakobson’s innovation to the development of verbal communication theory?(2)How could we determine its dominant function and interactive relationship among the six factors in the process of verbal communication?In the contemporary society,how could we expand the theoretical connotation of the six factors and the six functions from the perspective of semiotics?Those issues are the research focus of the present study.(3)What are the comteporary academic value of the six-factor-six-function model and its interpretive power concerning the status quo of the comtemporary society?As for research methods,the present study carries out research through literature reading,analysis and theoretical argumentation,and the author has achieved the following major findings:(1)Only three factors of the verbal communication process,i.e.sender,receiver and the referent,are expounded on by the following scholars including Plato,Locke,Saussure,Peirce,Richards,Lyons,and Halliday.Contrary to this,the Prague School has contributed a lot to the development of Jakobson’s verbal communication theory.Apart from Mathesius and Shpet’s statements concerning the functions of language,Buhler proposed an organon-model containing three functions,from which Mukarovsky proposed the poetic function focusing on the form of language and Malinowski put forward the concept of phatic communion.Based on the above basis and influenced by American communication theory,Jakobson added another two factors,i.e.contact and code,and proposed the metalingual function for his verbal communication theory,which becomes complete and systematic,and reaches a new height in terms of interpretive power and dynamism.(Chapter 2)(2)Any speech event contains the six factors and each of them serves a function.Language is multi-functional and hierarchical with one of the functions occupying the dominant position and determining the overt trend of the whole speech event.In terms of interactional relationship,the six factors and the six functions constitute three pairs,i.e.emotive and conative,referential and poetic,metalingual and phatic.Two factors of each pair ebb and flow;when one factor of each pair rises,the other factor correspondingly falls.There are also complicated interactional relationship among the six factors and the six functions.Most importantly,Jakobson’s six-factor-six-function model is not only a linguistic model,but also a semiotic one,enjoying immense interpretive power and applicable to any communicative event including I-I dialogue and human-machine coupling.(Chapter 3)For emotive and conative from the perspective of semiotics(Chapter 4),a variety of issues such as imperatives in linguistics,Austin’s speech act and contemporarily prevalent conative narrative are covered,which demonstrates that emotive function gradually recedes whilst conative function ascends to be the dominant mode of human communication and even the whole culture.For referential and poetic from the perspective of semiotics(Chapter 5),various issues such as context,dialogue,intertexuality,transtext as well as accompanying text emphasizes the single point that"We have grasped the meaning of a text even before we start to read it;only understandable texts are capable of being understood."(Zhao,2016:151)and a multitude of literary theories including literariness,ostranenie,foregrounding,axis of syntagmatic and paradidmatic as well as stadium and punctum,illustrate that poetic function becomes the dominant mode in comptemporary society and routes to achieve poetic function are diversified.For metalingual and phatic from the perspective of semiotics(Chapter 6),hierarchical relationship between object language and metalanguage has undergone three disciplines i.e.logic,linguistics and semiotics,and the existence of interpretation and evaluation whirlpool in contemporary culture prominently demonstrates the diversity and complexity of metalanguage;phatic communion is characterized by picture turn,multiple modality and phatic technology(WeChat and QQ),and the contemporary society has entered a "super-phaticity" time,in which repetition and recurrence are the main features and phaticity becomes the most important dominant mode.(3)In the fied of foreign language teaching,cultivation of students’ awareness of metalanguage and phatic communion cannot be neglected;the play theory explains why super-phaticity propels us into being willingly indulged in the pleasure of using phatic technology;Jakobson’s verbal communication theory,as a semiotic model,can be employed to interpret the underlying semiotic meaning of gifts,eloquent silence,and sequence of various dominant functions in children’s language acquisition.(Chapter 7)The contributions of the present study are mainly manifested in the following three aspects.(1)In terms of academic thought,the semiotic approach greatly expands the interpretive power of Jakobson’s verbal communication theory from the scope of linguistics to the whole society at large,and the six-factor-six-function model is not only a linguistic one but also a semiotic one,not only unique to linguistic symbols,but shared by verbal and non-verbal symbols.(2)In terms of academic viewpoints,through a theoretical analysis of Jakobson’s verbal communication theory,a language’s multi-functionality,dominant factor and ever-lasting ebbing and flowing among corresponding pairs are demonstrated and the contemporary society is mainly characterized by conative,peotic and phatic.(3)In terms of timeliness of research findings,the academic value of Jakobson’s verbal communication theory is immensely manifested in its theoretical interpretation and practical significance towards typical features in the contemporary society such as barrage and WeChat,multimodal emoticons,cultural markedness and pan-artification,interpretation vortex and evaluation vortex,the conative construction path,etc. |
